We’ll always risk to reward. But more and more the phase after life saving is trending toward “surround and drown” - not that I want to fight like detroit in the 2010’s, but yes we do make a call sometimes to stop risking when lives are all confirmed safe.

Did capitalism hit America so hard that they kicked them back to the Roman Era (yes, I'm referring to Crassus here)?

The United States is enormous and many parts of it are incredibly sparsely populated. For example, Niobrara County in Wyoming has a population of 2,467 and an area of 6,810 km^2, or a population density of 0.36/km^2.

For comparison, the Northern Borders province, the least dense province in Saudi Arabia, has as population density of 3.4/km^2, almost ten times more people per square kilometer.

People outside of the US really have no idea how empty much of the country is. I think there's an assumption that just because much of the land is livable (i.e. not desert, bare rock, etc.), it must occupied. But that's simply not the case here.

I am not judging the way things work in the US, just commenting that I don't think that population density is relevant here as the issue is one of right.

Now, of course, if you live 100 miles from the nearest town it may well take hours for the police or firefighters to show up when you call them. That's another issue.

As a side note, in this very case the issue wasn't remoteness since they could have had access to firefighters for a small annual fee. Rather it was a legal and administrative issue. But I would indeed be curious if voluntarily paying a fee rather then being taxed can have an impact on any enforceable expectation of service.

It is absolutely relevant because services can only be logistically and economically viable at certain levels of density. Fire services aren't very useful if it takes them a two-hour drive to reach the fire. So they have a maximum radius where they are useful. They only provide value to the people within that radius. If the density is too low, then there aren't enough people in there to afford supporting fire services.

You're not addressing my point, either, which is that there is a big difference between getting a crap service because you're hard to reach (which does happen including here in Europe) and having no right to call for help in the first place.

Again, I am not criticising, I am just thinking that there are different, separate issues here.

They inherently are. If these neighborhoods have fire coverage equivalent to that of a metropolis, but they would be paid for via taxation at the rate of $50K per year per household, that's not economically viable.

So in general people who live is more isolated houses end up being effectively subsidised by everyone else.

In your example the 'problem' stems from a tax base that is too narrow because of administrative and political choices.

In any case, that is NOT the point of my previous comments.

That being said, the locality in question sounds very much like the low density suburban locale that I'm currently living in. It costs a pretty penny for the government to maintain services here, since there are only about 100 homes in an area at the edge of the desert (which at a rate of 75 per home per month as stated in the article wouldn't be able to cover a basic firefighting service). Of course, that does not bother the government in providing funds for everything from a local police station, hospital (yes, not a clinic), fire station, municipality, garbage collection, etc. The only thing missing (for the local Arabs mostly) is a government school, but then folks with families don't bother with it.

I could draw a similar example of my place in India, which has similar low density characteristics, and to make matters worse, is located in a hilly part of the district, but that doesn't stop the govt. from providing a local police force and fire fighting service complete with a helicopter.

Some amenities are basic needs that if you don't receive, then what the hell are you paying taxes for? Freedoms per second?

And no, I'm not a stranger to America's vast landscape. The fact stands that there should have been better zoning - or don't expect any facility at all, but don't make news out of it.

On a side note, the main link of this thread quotes the example of insurance companies in London in the 1830s, who would compensate each other in case their firefighters took action on fires not in their jurisdiction. If our forebears had such sensible foresight and collective responsibility, then why not America today?

Or you could just let people live where they want to live and make sure they are aware of and agree to the consequences of that choice, which it sounds like they were in this case.

> If our forebears had such sensible foresight and collective responsibility, then why not America today?

Seems like you're generalizing an awful lot from one random news article that is news largely by virtue of the fact that what it describes is unusual.

Neighbourhood is the operative word here. In some parts of the rural United States, homes are far away and far between. Public services of the kind expected in populated areas are impractical, particularly for protection of property rather than life.

With that as a baseline, some "rural" areas maintain this peculiar, low-cost characteristic even as they become more populated. There's a degree of self-sorting behaviour as well, since some residents become attracted to the area specifically for its vanishingly small local tax burden.

“Unincorporated land” means that the landowners have chosen not to incorporate (create) a municipal (ie city/neighborhood) government.

It’s “rugged individualism”.

Virginia is also technically a Commonwealth and not a state as well.